One of the biggest factors in the survival of slavery in the American South before the Civil War was the belief of white Southerners that once freed ex-slaves would turn on whites in a barbaric war of bloody vengeance. This fear does much to explain why Abraham Lincoln’s election in 186o triggered secession in the Lower South. With slaves making up a larger percentage of their population than in the Upper South, whites in the Deep South believed they could not afford even the slightest possibility of emancipation. Not only their prosperity but their lives, they firmly believed, depended on it. With Lincoln intent on closing off slavery’s expansion in the West and putting the institution on the road to extinction, whites in the Lower South no longer felt safe in the Union.

With a smaller percentage of slaves in their population, white Southerners in the Upper South believed they could wait and see what were the true intentions of Lincoln administration toward the peculiar institution. When President Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the rebellion in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter, four Upper South States (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) concluded that Lincoln was a dire threat to slavery and constitutional government, and seceded. Four other Upper South states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) with stronger Unionism and smaller slave populations (as well as the Lincoln administration’s influence) stayed within the Union. But the fear of the slave population remained real, as the Maryland insurrection scare in April 1861 makes manifest. These states also remained resolutely opposed to emancipation.

Many white Northerners also feared freed slaves. A good example is Abraham Lincoln himself. It explains why he pushed emigration as well as gradual compensated emancipation in the loyal slave states during the first half of 1862. Lincoln believed that with the bad memories of slavery, African Americans could never live side-by-side peacefully with their former owners and other whites.

The fear of freed slaves even made it into the British press. On January 10, 1862, Richmond’s Daily Dispatch approvingly reprinted an article from the Times of London, that had appeared the previous month, critical on the Lincoln’s conduct of the war, and laying the blame on the North for the growing bitterness of the conflict. Despite the peaceful end of slavery in the British Caribbean colonies in the 1830s, the Times clearly accepted the notion prevalent in the South that the Union conduct of the war constituted a cynical version of John Brown’s 1859 raid writ large. A passage from the Times read:

The day after this article appeared, a similar article appeared in the National Republican, Washington, D.C.’s Republican newspaper, with the title, “How The Freed Slaves Behave.” It was a reprint of an article from the New York World, which editorially followed the Democratic Party. A fact which gives it credibility, since what the World‘s correspondent reported went against the paper’s editorial line. He provided an account of the fate of the several thousand Missouri slaves that had taken advantage of the unrest in the state during Fall 1861 and James Henry Lane’s raid to escape slavery for freedom in Kansas. Rather than resorting to barbaric violence, the World‘s correspondent reported the freed people were quickly on their way to being peaceful and productive. He wrote:

While the account from the New York World is to some extent a pollyannaish effort to put a good face on the fate of Missouri refuge slaves in Kansas, extolling the virtues of free labor ideology, it was an important harbinger of the fact that as they were freed, former slaves did not turn on their owners or other whites in revenge, but instead tended quickly to become constructive members of society, who as the article ends were “fit for freedom.”

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com